How to Design a Vibrotactile Language - Part 1; Establishing the Framework

In this recurring series – Principles and Rules of Haptic Design – I share my personal design philosophies for successfully implementing haptics, giving examples and explaining some of the science that underpins the rule. The series is based on my lectures, research, and work to help novice practitioners avoid the pitfalls and mistakes I made when I started in haptics.

Introduction

An incoming email used to be a brash shout – "You've Got Mail". These days, it's a soft chime, or more likely a simple buzz on our phone. Great deals of effort go into the vibrations of notifications. Designers try to find ways to communicate content, context, urgency, and much more into a simple set of pulses and vibes. But only so much information can easily fit into a haptic pattern – at a certain point you're just recreating morse code. So how do we create a good vibrotactile language? How do we create intuitive, interpretable messaging that can be understood through the low bandwidth of our skin? In part one of this two-part post on vibrotactile languages, as part of my Principles and Rules of Haptic Design, I will discuss how I teach my students and clients good vibes.

The Double Diamond Approach

If you've ever taken a class in a design school, you've got a mental tattoo of the double diamond framework permanently embedded deep within your brain. If not, welcome to your first lecture! The double-diamond design approach is a problem-solving framework widely used across design thinking. Utilizing convergent and divergent thinking, the double diamond helps keep me on track during my problem-solving approach (something my ADHD brain very much appreciates) by splitting up the work into two phases – "Doing the right thing" and "Doing the thing right".

As you can see, the double diamond consists of four stages: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver (bonus points for some good alliteration). The first stage, "Discover," involves research and exploration to gather information and generate ideas. The second, "Define," involves analyzing the information gathered during the Discover stage to identify the problem and define the design challenge. The third stage, "Develop," involves ideation and prototyping to generate and test potential solutions with users. The final stage, "Deliver," involves refining and delivering the chosen solution to the intended users.

The Problem

So now that we have an outline of our approach to the challenge let's find a problem to solve. Typically, when I run this as a workshop, I work with my clients to develop briefs relevant to their business cases. When I run it with students, I pick whatever tickles my fancy, and recently, I've been on a bit of a fitness binge, so I developed the following short brief:

You are a designer for a high-end sports technology company. You have been asked to support the development of a wristband wearable specifically for high endurance/performance runners. These users are semi-professional or professional and travel for multiple marathons per year. The device shall help these runners achieve new personal best times in their marathons by monitoring biometric and GPS data and providing real-time feedback to the user. Develop vibrotactile haptic feedback that will support these runners in achieving their goals.

Deconstruct the Brief into Requirements and Constraints

When faced with a design brief, jumping straight into brainstorming and ideation can be tempting. However, we should temper that instinct. There's a lot of information inside these short lines and, more critically, quite a bit that's missing. Taking the time to deconstruct the brief is a crucial step in creating a successful design. I advise my students to read the brief carefully, highlighting essential information such as the project scope, target audience, and desired outcome. I also challenge my students to imagine the origins of the brief from the client's perspective. What is the client's greater mission? What's the "inner why" driving this product? My annotated brief is below:

Annotated Wearable Project Brief

Target Audience

Semi-professional or professional runners who participate in multiple marathons per year.

Desired Outcome

The device shall help these runners achieve new personal best times in their marathons by monitoring biometric and GPS data and providing real-time feedback to the user. Develop vibrotactile haptic feedback that will support this runner.

Greater Mission

Help every runner find their true potential

Key Insights

The target audience is semi-professional or professional runners.
The device should be focused on improving athletic performance – quantifiable as time – during a marathon.
The device will use biometric and GPS data.
The device should use as output vibrotactile feedback in real-time.

Creating your Persona

Once we've started to rip the brief apart, we start to develop insight into our user. The better we understand our user, the better we can tailor our patterning design to fit their mindset. User personas are another useful tool in successful design practice. We must infuse our background knowledge and research with imagination to develop a persona that accurately reflects our target customer. Our goal is to clearly understand their needs, behaviors, and preferences. Give your persona a name, age, job title, and other personal details to help you visualize them as real. Then, flesh out their personality traits, preferences, and behaviors to create a complete picture of who they are and what they want. We want to include demographics, goals, motivations, and pain points. This can be done through market research, surveys, interviews, or user testing. By creating a well-defined user persona, you can ensure that your design decisions are grounded in research and will resonate with your users. I recommend creating no more than three specific and detailed user personas. If you're looking for additional resources, I highly suggest this write-up.

How to Create a Persona:

Identify Key Characteristics

Gather information about your target audience's demographics, goals, motivations, and pain points.

Create a Fictional Character

Use the information to create a persona with a name, age, job title, and other personal details.

Flesh out motivations and drivers

Define their personality, preferences, and behaviors to create a complete picture. Determine your user's routines, and how their needs are not met

Contextualize and conceptualize

Determine how the cultural contexts, and the product or technological ecosystems adopted by your hypothetical user may interact with your drives and demands.

For our wearable, I've gone ahead and created a persona – Markus. A bit of a fitness fanatic, Markus has a long history of endurance sports, cycling and swimming. He's thinking of doing triathlons soon, and to really challenge himself, Markus is currently training for the Berlin Marathon. Unlike Markus, my latest marathon attempt involved binge-watching sci-fi movies and eating a mountain of nachos. So we're going to need a good persona to create some level of empathy with my target audience. For Markus – a young, tech-savvy well-off man – his GPS-connected smartwatch is a key companion to his fitness journey and fitness ecosystem. He likes to pre-plan his rides and runs using programs like Komoot and Strava. He'll then upload the route; which varies week to week. After each session, he compares his pacing segment by segment with the hope that the data will give him a path towards a faster time. He likes to get into the zone when he's running, avoiding distractions like music that might pull him off his pace.

Key Insights from the Persona:

Enjoy's the gamification of data to improve performance.
Competes against himself and his own performance.
Route varies, rather than a singular practiced loop, meaning some sections will be new, while others may be repeated.
Doesn't like lots of notifications or distractions
Invests heavily in health-tech products. Cost is secondary to functionality

Contextualizing Contact

Context is critical to properly designing haptic technology. As a freelancer, I operated under the name Contaxtual Labs, a portmanteau of "contact" and "context," highlighting the importance of understanding the context in which haptic technology will be used. Without a clear understanding of the context, there's no way to have good contact with the user. There are five main bits of interaction-centric contextual information to explore:

*Photo by* *Nadine Shaabana* on *Unsplash*

Device: Is there a single device or multiple? How do devices work together? Are there modes on some devices but not others? What inputs and outputs exist on each device?
Information: What are the information inputs? What are the information outputs? What is the resolution and fidelity of the information? Is the information physical or digital? Is the information needed by the device or by the user?
Social / Interpersonal: What are the relevant social groups? What are the group dynamics? What are the cultural and social norms? Who is impacted by the experience? How do the experience and interaction impact the surrounding group?
Physical: What physical infrastructures are relevant? What physical accesses and proximities are needed? Which are impacted? What fluctuations are there in the physical space and context? Are there multiple physical contexts, and how do they differ? What are the safety concerns?
Specialized: Is there a need for specialized subject matter expertise? Are there unique tools? Unique skills? Are there unique rules? Are there unique attention demands or focus needs?

We also need to explore the wearable's product-related context and determine the design brief's constraints and limitations. Aspects such as budget, timeline, and technical limitations will play significant roles in determining the complexities that can be incorporated into the language design. The language that can be developed for a wearable with an unlimited budget will be different from the language that can be developed with a bill of material cost restraints.

I can communicate with the client to see if their marketing and business strategy for the fitness watch can provide further details. This typically results in a list of requirements. (I've linked a good example template HERE.).

For the sake of brevity, I'll highlight some hypothetical requirements here:

Design is a wristwatch, 40mm in diameter, 50g mass. Run time of 10 hours in full training mode. IP77 rating. Stainless steel and plastic housing. Silicone strapping. Actuator type, LRA. Actuator impulse 1.8G-pp @ 100g.

Conclusion

When I worked as a military/defense consultant in the USA, I had a contract with some Marines. Beyond some of the most colorful language I've ever heard, they also taught me about the 5P's – Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.

The entire first half of the double design diamond is about preparing. The ability to collect data and collate it into a useful design direction is key to preventing wasted effort, but more importantly, it helps ensure that our messages are presented to the user in a context they can easily understand. Much like how I don't send greeting cards to my family in Klingon, our vibrotactile language has to latch onto the pre-existing knowledge that our target user has. The better we understand and explore these contexts, the better we can resonate with our users. The goals of the techniques in this blogpost are to create that critical level of empathy with your hypothetical users. Only once you're fully able to think from their perspective can you truly create an effective language.

In part two of this post, I'll work through the second diamond, the development and delivery of a vibrotactile language. We'll explore interaction design principles, haptic sketching, and user validation.